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One of the cheekier songs on Sabrina Carpenter\u2019s new album, \u201cMan\u2019s Best Friend,\u201d is \u201cGo Go Juice,\u201d<\/a> a country-microwaved self-deprecation about finding succor at the bottom of a bottle, and maybe with a boy she\u2019d just as soon forget.<\/p>\n \u201cLove when happy hour comes at 10 a.m. o\u2019clock on a Tuesday,\u201d Carpenter sings at the top.<\/p>\n Catch that? The redundancy in the lyric is funny or sloppy \u2014 maybe both.<\/p>\n That kind of whimsy was there, too, on Carpenter\u2019s breakout hit, \u201cEspresso\u201d<\/a> \u2014 \u201cThat\u2019s that me, espresso,\u201d she cooed, grammar be damned. These tiny flourishes made her last album, the breakout \u201cShort n\u2019 Sweet,\u201d<\/a> with witty hits like \u201cTaste\u201d and \u201cPlease Please Please,\u201d feel like a suite of off-kilter intimacies. It earned her six Grammy nominations, and alongside Chappell Roan, Carpenter became one of pop\u2019s new queens of quirk, making theatrically comic gestures feel human-scaled.<\/p>\n On this slight and frail but occasionally amusing new album, though, her character is still in development \u2014 what felt like hard-earned idiosyncrasy on her last album feels calculatedly careless here. Arriving one year and six days after its predecessor, \u201cMan\u2019s Best Friend\u201d has all the hallmarks of a rush job: lyrical conceits that aren\u2019t fully fleshed out, vocals that get crammed into prefab melodies, a repetition of themes that suggests a single idea viewed from multiple angles.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There are a tight dozen tracks here, nearly 39 minutes in all, and the sound is luxuriant early \u201980s pop with varying amounts of sleaze. But time and again, Carpenter\u2019s songs appear as if built from the concept down \u2014 convincing from a distance, brittle within.<\/p>\n Carpenter\u2019s preferred weapon is blunt-force drama in the bed, at her best hilariously relating madcap adventures of sex and not-quite-romance. Sometimes, she\u2019s the victim, sometimes she\u2019s the villain, and she attacks both roles with equal gusto. On the album\u2019s primary cover, she is on her knees, a man grabbing a thatch of her hair. Depending on your degree of cynicism, she looks ravenous, or dazed or something far more worrying. (Predictably, and intentionally, it stirred an online outcry<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Beyond that, however, there\u2019s an unsteadiness to Carpenter\u2019s project. \u201cMan\u2019s Best Friend\u201d is her seventh studio album, but the third of her grown-up pop star arc. (The prior ones are Disney era; she starred on \u201cGirl Meets World.\u201d) On those three, Carpenter has been three different kinds of performers: a confessionalist on \u201cEmails I Can\u2019t Send\u201d from 2022, and on \u201cShort n\u2019 Sweet,\u201d either a dance-pop diva aspirant or a maker of lush, lustful anthems.<\/p>\n Bawdiness reigns on \u201cMan\u2019s Best Friend,\u201d even if it\u2019s a harried version of it. Carpenter leans on heavy-handed metaphor on the light disco stomp \u201cTears,\u201d about how being a nice guy pays off, and on \u201cHouse Tour,\u201d about how being a nice guy pays off \u2026 if he can see past metaphor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Carpenter is best when playful, but not winking. Accordingly, the most effective songs here are the most literal: The Ariana Grande-esque \u201cWhen Did You Get Hot?\u201d (\u201cI did a double take, triple take \/ Take me to naked Twister back at your place\u201d) literally descends into lip-biting panting. The yacht-rock<\/a>-smooth \u201cNever Getting Laid\u201d simply captures what it\u2019s like to be rejected, and then do some rejecting in response to reclaim control.<\/p>\n More often, though, a brittleness permeates these songs. On \u201cWe Almost Broke Up Again Last Night,\u201d which captures the skittish EKG line of an imperfect relationship, the lyrical arc doesn\u2019t match the melodic arc, which doesn\u2019t match the emotional arc of the singing. On songs like \u201cMy Man on Willpower\u201d and \u201cSugar Talking,\u201d Carpenter\u2019s syllables feel crammed into awkward spaces. (This would be less egregious had she not elegantly nailed the intonation on \u201cManchild,\u201d where she doles out eighth notes like a disappointed schoolteacher.) Carpenter is a strong and performatively sweet singer, but often on this album her upper register is squeezed almost to fragility.<\/p>\n